PlayStation Fans who purchased Discovery TV shows from the PlayStation Store are to lose access to their content due to licensing agreements expiring.
Yes, another reason why digital content sucks. PlayStation owners who have bought Discovery Channel TV shows from the PlayStation Store will be losing access to these shows. It is worth stating these shows were ‘purchased’ and not ‘rented’. Just like you would purchase a game from the PS store and assume you will always have access to it. People who bought these TV shows thought they would always have access to them. Apparently, this is not the case.
This issue was reported by Does it Play on X, a website that is devoted to game preservation. Does it Play posted a screenshot of an email they received from PlayStation notifying them that they would be losing their Discovery content?
PlayStation Fanatic was able to find the list of soon-to-be-lost TV shows on the US PlayStation’s site support page. The list includes quite a lot of Discovery documentaries and reality shows. Granted most of these shows sound like they are total garbage but that’s not the point. The point is, that people who purchase digital content should not lose access to it.
It is not the first time PlayStation fans who have bought movies or TV shows on the PS Store have lost access to them. In July last year, The Verge reported that PlayStation users in Germany and Austria would be unable to watch StudioCanal movies and shows bought via the PlayStation Store.
You don’t actually ‘own’ digital content
The debate about digital content DRM and licence agreements could take up a whole other article, similar to my article on game preservation and the PS5 Slim’s disc drive. The problem with digital content is that you don’t actually own it.
One user who took to Reddit to vent their frustrations at losing their Discovery TV shows was left facing the stark reality that they don’t own them. Not in the same way you can own a physical DVD or a physical game disc.
This is the messy reality of digital content. You are only really paying for a license to use it. If that license goes away due to agreements expiring or servers hosting the content shut down, youa re pretty much fucked.
Until companies like PlayStation and the millions of others who provide digital content sort this out, physical media is always going to be superior to digital.
